“Whatever do you suppose set him off so?” Rankin wondered aloud as they resumed their rapid, swinging walk through the cold air.
“I’m afraid I did,” Lydia surmised. “I had a wretched fit of the blues, and I guess he must have caught them from me.”
Rankin looked down at her keenly, his thoughts apparently quite altered by her phrase. “Ah, he worries a great deal about you,” he murmured.
Lydia laughed nervously, and said nothing. They walked swiftly in silence. The stars were thick above them in the wind-swept autumn night. Lydia tilted her head to look up at them once or twice. She saw Rankin’s face pale under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, his eyes meeting hers in an intent regard like a wordless speech. The fine, cold, austere wind swept them along like leaves, whipping their young pulses, chanting loudly in the leafless branches of the maples, and filling the dark spaces above with a great humming roar. They thrilled responsive to all this and to the mood of high seriousness each divined in the other.
Lydia’s voice, breaking in upon the intimate silence, continued the talk, but it was with another note. The mute interval, filled with wind and darkness and the light of stars, had swung them up to a higher plane. She spoke with an artless sureness of comprehension—a certainty—they were close in spirit at that moment, and she was not frightened, not even conscious of it. “Why should the doctor worry? What is the matter? Marietta says the trouble with me is that I’m spoiled with having everything that I want.”
“Have you everything you want?” Rankin’s bluntness of interrogation was unmitigated.
Lydia looked up at him swiftly, keenly. In his grave face there was that which made her break out with an open quivering emotion she had not shown even to the doctor’s loving heart. “It’s a weight on my very soul—that there’s nothing for me to look forward to—nothing, nothing that’s worth growing up to do. I haven’t been taught anything—but I know I want to be something better than—perhaps I can’t be—but I want to try! I want to try! That’s not much to ask—just a chance to try—But I don’t even know how to get that. I don’t even dare to speak of—of—such things. People laugh and say it’s Sunday-schooley fancies that’ll disappear, that I’ll forget as I get into living. But I don’t want to forget. I’m afraid I shall. I want to keep trying. I don’t know—”
They did not slacken their swift advance as they talked. They looked at each other seriously in the starlight.
Rankin had given an indrawn exclamation as she finished, and after an instant’s pause he said, with a deep emotion, “Oh, perhaps—at least we both want to try—Be Ariadne for me! Help me to find the clue to what’s wrong in our lives, and perhaps—” He looked down at her, shaken, drawing quick breaths. She answered his gaze silently, her face as shining white as his.
He went on: “You shall decide what Ariadne may be or may come to be—I will take whatever you choose to give—and bless you!”